1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a graphic processing method and apparatus, and more particularly, to a graphic processing method and apparatus capable of processing a 3D computer image by using a tile-based rendering.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, in a tile-based graphic processing apparatus, rendering is performed for each tile. The tile-based rendering has advantages of reducing a storage space of an internal memory of the graphic processing apparatus and a memory bandwidth.
However, in order to perform the rendering in the tile-based graphic processing apparatus, primitive data needs to be repetitively stored every display list for each tile. Accordingly, in the case of large primitive covering a plurality of tiles, sine the primitive data need to be stored every display list for each tile, a lot of memory storage spaces and a lot of memory bandwidths are used.
For example, a screen having the resolution of 1280*1024 is divided into 5120 tiles configured of 16×16 pixels. In this case, in the case of a primitive covering the entire screen, the primitive data need to be stored every display list for all tiles. If 8 bites for storing each primitive data are required, a total of primitive data to be stored becomes 5120*8=41 Kbyte. In this case, since the memory storage space and the memory bandwidth are largely influenced, the performance of the 3D graphic processing apparatus is also deteriorated.
Accordingly, during the 3D graphic processing, from the viewpoint of the memory storage space and the memory bandwidth, a method capable of more efficiently processing the 3D graphic is required.